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In oncology, decision-making in individual situations is often very complex. To deal with such complexity, people tend to reduce it by relying on their initial intuition. The downside of this intuitive, subjective way of decision-making is that it is prone to cognitive and emotional biases such as overestimating the quality of its judgements or being influenced by one’s current mood. Hence, clinical predictions based on intuition often turn out to be wrong and to be outperformed by statistical predictions. Structuring and objectivizing oncological decision-making may thus overcome some of these issues and have advantages such as avoidance of unwarranted clinical practice variance or error-prevention. Even for uncertain situations with limited medical evidence available or controversies about the best treatment option, structured decision-making approaches like clinical algorithms could outperform intuitive decision-making. However, the idea of such algorithms is not to prescribe the clinician which decision to make nor to abolish medical judgement, but to support physicians in making decisions in a systematic and structured manner. An example for a use-case scenario where such an approach may be feasible is the selection of treatment dose in radiation oncology. In this paper, we will describe how a clinical algorithm for selection of a fractionation scheme for palliative irradiation of bone metastases can be created. We explain which steps in the creation process of a clinical algorithm for supporting decision-making need to be performed and which challenges and limitations have to be considered.

Managers often have limited available time to make high-quality strategic decisions that are both original and feasible. This joint objective is important but difficult to achieve because under time constraints, managers must combine different cognitive processes that are often influenced by emotional states. However, research investigating how time constraints and emotions interact and impact the quality of strategic decisions is scarce. Building upon the affect infusion model and information processing perspective, our experimental study involving 174 managers shows that the impact of time constraints and emotions varies across the two decision-making tasks of strategic idea generation and strategic choice. In particular, compared to the managers in a neutral emotional state under low time constraints, the happy managers under high time constraints seemed to generate fewer original and fewer feasible strategic ideas and appeared to make worse original strategic choices, while compared to the managers in a neutral emotional state under low time constraints, the sad managers under high time constraints made better original strategic choices. Our study contributes novel insight into behavioral strategy research by showing how time constraints and emotions causally and jointly influence different quality dimensions in various tasks involving strategic decision-making.

Many important decisions are made without precise information about the probabilities of the outcomes. In such situations, individual ambiguity attitudes influence decision making. The present study identifies emotions as a transient cause of ambiguity attitudes. We conducted two random-assignment, incentive-compatible laboratory experiments, varying subjects’ emotional states. We find that sadness induces choices that are closer to ambiguity-neutral attitudes compared with the joy, fear, and control groups, where decision makers deviate more from payoff-maximizing behavior.

Recent discussions in decision sciences and economics stress the potential impact of affect on decision outcomes. In this study, we conducted incentive-compatible laboratory experiments (N = 253) to investigate whether affect causes temporary fluctuations in risk preferences. In particular, we employed film clips to induce participants into joyful, fearful and sad affective states and subsequently elicited risk preferences by asking the participants to make choices among different lotteries. The financial consequences of the lottery choices varied randomly among the fixed-, low-, and high-stakes treatment groups. We find only weak evidence that affective states influence risk preferences. In particular, we find some evidence that sadness leads to risk aversion, but we find no effects for joy and fear. Our findings question recent claims in the literature that the relationship between affect and risk preferences is strong and unambiguous.

Many important decisions are made without precise information about the probabilities of the outcomes. In such situations, individual ambiguity attitudes influence decision making. The present study identifies affective states as a transient cause of ambiguity attitudes. We conducted two random-assignment, incentive-compatible laboratory experiments, varying subjects’ affective states. We find that sadness induces choices that are closer to ambiguity-neutral attitudes compared with the joy, fear, and control groups, where decision makers deviate more from payoff-maximizing behaviors and are more susceptible to likelihood insensitivity. We also find a similar pattern in a representative population sample where cloudy weather conditions on the day of the survey -- a proxy for sad affect -- correlate with more ambiguity-neutral attitudes. Our results may help explain real-world phenomena such as financial markets that react to regular fluctuations in weather conditions. Number of Pages in PDF File: 38

This research examines the interplay of opportunity evaluation and emotions as determinants of entrepreneurial exploitation, using affect-as-information theory and the affective processing principle as conceptual bases. Three central assumptions are confirmed across two studies. The first is that the effects of opportunity characteristics on exploitation are mediated by evaluation. The second is that emotions influence exploitation decisions in addition to evaluation. Fear reduces exploitation whereas joy and anger increase it. The third is that fear, joy, and anger influence evaluation’s effect on exploitation with higher levels of fear reducing and higher levels of joy and anger increasing the positive impact of evaluation on exploitation.

Entrepreneurial commitment can be regarded as the central antecedent to entrepreneurial action. However, we know little about how situational factors influence entrepreneurial commitment. This pape...

Overconfidence has been identified as a source of suboptimal decision making in many real-life domains, with often far-reaching consequences. This study identifies a mechanism that can cause overconfidence and demonstrates a simple, effective countermeasure in an incentive-compatible experimental study. We observed that joy induced overconfidence if the reason for joy (an unexpected gift) was unrelated to the judgment task and if participants were not made specifically aware of this mood manipulation. In contrast, we observed well-calibrated judgments among participants in a control group who were in their resting mood. Furthermore, we found well-calibrated judgments among participants who received the joyful mood induction together with questions that forced them to reflect on their current mood and the (ir)relevance of its cause to our judgment tasks. Our findings suggest that being aware of one's positive mood and the reason for that mood may effectively reduce overconfidence for a short period.

Current studies indicate that self-employment may be a negative signal to potential employers, but the reasons have not been identified. We investigate job candidates’ human capital and environmental characteristics based on 135,000 observations of job candidates and recruiters from an online job market portal. Our results demonstrate that job candidates who are entrepreneurial are significantly less interesting to recruiters for wage employment than employed job candidates. Recruiter interest in entrepreneurial job candidates depends on entrepreneurial job candidate’s education, job tenure, current salary, prior industry experience, and level of entrepreneurial activity in their country of origin.

Joy is a potential transient cause of overconfidence. We study its effects on absolute and relative overconfidence in an incentive compatible decision experiment. In the experiment, a general knowledge task of medium difficulty is used to measure confidence. We report two main results. First, joy indeed increases the tendency to be overconfident. Second, making an irrelevant cause of joy salient to people (i.e. by showing them a humorous movie clip) leads to well-calibrated judgments. Our results are consistent with the affect-as-information hypothesis, which suggests that affective states with a non-salient and irrelevant cause have an informative function that can lead to biased judgments. However, if the cause of the affective state is salient and obviously irrelevant (i.e. a humorous movie), the informative function is deactivated, leading to better judgments and decisions.

Many important decisions are made without precise information about the probabilities of the outcomes. In such situations, individual ambiguity attitudes influence decision making. The present study identifies affective states as a transient cause of ambiguity attitudes. We conducted two random-assignment incentive-compatible experiments, varying subjects’ affective states. We find that sadness induces choices that are closer to ambiguity-neutral attitudes compared to the joy, fear, and control group where decision makers deviate more from payoff- maximizing behavior and are more susceptible to likelihood insensitivity. We also find a similar pattern in a representative population sample where cloudy weather conditions at the day of the survey - a proxy for sad affect - correlate with more ambiguity-neutral attitudes. Our results may help to explain real- world phenomena such as financial markets that react to regular fluctuations in weather conditions.